


Seven Attempted Escapes from Silence

by metafictionally



Category: Dragon Age
Genre: M/M, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-10
Updated: 2012-02-10
Packaged: 2017-10-30 22:30:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/336885
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/metafictionally/pseuds/metafictionally
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seven of Anders' escape attempts, with varying degrees of success. <i>Anders swallows against the same cold, unforgiving lump in the back of his throat that had been set there years ago, and tries to sleep away his restless anger.</i> (Hawke/Anders, ~3800w.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Seven Attempted Escapes from Silence

**Author's Note:**

> 1\. The title (and to an extent, the theme) of this fic comes from Jonathan Safran Foer's opera of the same title.  
> 2\. Thank you to [spicyshimmy](http://archiveofourown.org/users/spicyshimmy/) and [kinneas](http://archiveofourown.org/users/kinneas) for holding my hand and, in the latter's case, kicking my ass into correcting my continuity errors.

—

**i. tunnels**

There isn’t any light. Under feet of rock and soil, everything is dark and quiet and damp, and the smell of mildew is so strong that it’s almost suffocating. Anders’ breathing is much too loud in the quiet—he’ll give himself away if he keeps this up, but he can’t help it. His throat is raw, aching, and he can’t stop himself gasping for oxygen—feels like he’s drowning. Even his heartbeat is desperate and thunderous in his ears. He wonders if they can hear it, up above.

He doesn’t want to be found.

The barn was an accident. He’d never meant for it to happen, he’d never looked at the barn and thought _fire_ and made it be so. And he’s heard the word _mage_ on everyone’s lips before, but he’s not a mage, it was an _accident_ and he’d promised that it wouldn’t happen again— But even as his parents nod and say they forgive him, he recognizes the fear in his father’s eyes, and knows what’s coming.

“I’m not a mage,” he whispers into the inky blackness of the tunnel. His throat is dry, and his voice catches, blurs the last syllable, and heat prickles behind his eyes and stings them into watering. “I’m not.”

Even with his eyes wide open, he can’t see anything ahead of him.

These tunnels had made him feel claustrophobic the first time he’d found them, when he’d scrambled down through the trap door in the floor of the barn and found himself surrounded by darkness. Then, his pulse had gone funny and his palms cold, and he’d only managed a few steps into the tunnel before he couldn’t take it and scrambled back up the ladder, scared away by the potential for oblivion. Now, though, Anders would take clammy palms and erratic heartbeats over being taken away to the Circle.

A footstep in the blackness, and his mother’s voice says his name.

Anders shrinks back against the wall, but he knows he’s been found. Footsteps approach, and then he can make out the shape of his mother, illuminated by the dim glow of a candle. To his straining eyes, the glow makes everything look blurred at the edges, unreal (how he wishes this weren’t real).

“You won’t let them take me,” he says. He says it like a demand because he wants it to be so, but he falters, and it becomes a question. “You’ll stop them? Mother?”

The glow of the candle makes his mother’s eyes seem deep and endless. There’s no fear in them, not like there is in his father’s, but she has no words of comfort—even before she reaches out and takes his hand, Anders knows she cannot save him. “Mother,” he says, his voice just a broken whisper.

He loves her, and so he forgives her even as the pain of betrayal settles into the pit of his stomach.

They walk together through the tunnels, hand-in-hand, and his mother delivers him to the templars waiting in the ruined debris that was once their family’s barn. When she pulls away they put manacles on Anders’ wrists, chains to hold his limbs in place, and the weight of them becomes an unforgiving, cold lump that settles in the back of his throat and makes it hard to breathe.

She does not say goodbye, and Anders does not look back.

—

**ii. waters**

“Don’t,” Kinnon says when he catches Anders eyeing the distance to the Lake Calenhad Docks. He’s been thinking this over for a week—long enough to have judged the distance, or at least Anders thinks he has. It’s far, far enough that he’d be tired when he reached them, but it’s not unswimmable, and he’s strong. Well, he’s tenacious at the very least, and tenacity is half the battle. “Don’t be an idiot, you know they’ll only catch you— _again_ , like they’ve caught you the last three times you’ve tried—”

“Hush.” Anders doesn’t quite put a hand over Kinnon’s mouth to quiet him, but it’s a close thing—he always did talk too loudly around too many people, and Anders would rather not fail again. “I’m not doing anything.”

“Yet,” Kinnon grumbles. He pitches his voice lower, for which Anders is thankful, but does not drop the subject, for which Anders is not. “You’re a terrible liar, ever since I’ve known you. You’re not doing anything, but you will be soon unless somebody talks you out of it.”

“In as long as you’ve known me,” Anders says, “how many times have you been able to talk me out of anything?”

“...I haven’t.”

“Exactly,” Anders says, then shrugs off his robe and dives into the water.

Even without his robe, he hadn’t quite anticipated how heavy his clothes could be when soaked, but he has no choice. It’s either continue on to the docks, the weight of his clothes be damned, or abandon the task altogether and go back to the Circle, and he will not—he _will not_ go back, not to that place. The Circle Tower is a prison painted to look like a church, and Anders would rather drown in the murky depths of Lake Calenhad than set foot in that place one more time.

No one looks twice at a skinny, waterlogged gutter rat lurking in the shadows of buildings near the Docks—not when half the children in Ferelden, it seems, are orphaned by the Blight, not when half the population of the docks are street urchins begging for money and food. Anders slips unnoticed under the gazes of the people walking around and sleeps in the meager shelter offered by overhanging roofs and alcoved doorways.

“Orphaned?” one girl asks him. Her name is Kaia, and she’s malnourished and gaunt as a skeleton, her bones taut against her thin, pale skin. She watches him, her eyes huge over sunken cheekbones, and Anders thinks about the way they’d eaten in the Tower and feels sick to his stomach.

“Yes,” he says, because it’s safer than the truth.

They sleep in the same alcove that night, tucked into themselves against the chill of evening. Kaia offers Anders her blanket, barely a scrap of wool probably salvaged from someone’s pile of things to be burned—he tries to turn her away, but she won’t have it. “I know the faces around here and you’re new,” she says, which Anders knows means _I know the cold and can endure it, and you don’t and can’t_. In the end, they huddle together and Anders tries not to think about the sharp way her bones press against him.

“Sometimes y’hear screaming from the tower,” Kaia says thoughtfully, her gaze tracking the tower up where it rises over the roofs of the dock buildings. “I don’t envy them apprentice kids.”

She’s so thin she’s almost a corpse, so thin Anders can count her vertebrae, and she _doesn’t envy_ the apprentices in the Tower. It’s enough to make him want to cry—but crying is something they’d trained out of him at the very beginning. Instead, Anders swallows against the same cold, unforgiving lump in the back of his throat that had been set there years ago, and tries to sleep away his restless anger.

Five days after his escape, he makes arrangements to ride in the back of a caravan away from Lake Calenhad to the Coastlands. From there—well. From there, he doesn’t know what will happen. Maybe he’ll make his way to Highever and take a the ferry across to Kirkwall—and from the Free Marches it would be easy to get to the Imperium. He would be a refugee, but he would be safe. He would be _free_.

Maybe, he thinks, maybe he’ll bring Kaia with him. Anders has never stolen but he would for her, in thanks for the blanket she’d given him. Maybe they can make it to Highever together, to the Free Marches and the Imperium—they can leave behind the despair of the Blight. He would do that. He _could_ do that.

Six days after his escape, Anders finds Kaia’s body in a pile of garbage at the side of the docks, her lips pale and cracked, eyes half-open. It’s unfair. Nothing is fair. Nothing has been fair for Anders since the moment he set that barn aflame—why should this have been any different?

Seven days after his escape, a templar catches him by the back of his shirt and hauls him back to the Circle, and that night it’s his screams that echo over Lake Calenhad.

—

**iii. solitude**

There is plenty of time to think in solitary confinement. In a small room, barely wide enough for Anders to straighten his arms and turn a circle without his fingertips brushing stone, there’s nothing to do _but_ think—and so he does. He thinks, and he cultivates ideas, and he works his thoughts over until they become weapons in his hands.

Anders learns things about himself in that room, locked high in the tower with a cat for company. He learns the limits of his knuckle bones before they break against the stone of the wall. He learns how many times in a row he can sing the same popular drinking song before he wants to reach into his brain and scrub the melody away. He learns his own capacity for hatred (and it terrifies him).

The problem is that there is nobody, in solitary confinement, to distract Anders from himself. There is nobody to redirect his focus, to prevent him from self-immolating. There is no one in that room but Anders and his ghosts and his fears hate anger pain want betrayal to keep him company.

And Anders becomes angry.

It’s not the hot anger of children who have had their favorite toy taken away, not even the anger he’d felt when his father had sold his only son to the templars. That anger had been hot, and it had controlled him, consumed him. This anger is not like that. It burns just as fiercely, yes, but it’s cold, and Anders hones it until he can control it.

This anger will be his weapon, he decides, when he declares war against the Circle.

—

**iv. horizons**

It isn’t the way he had hoped things would go, but when the Warden-Commander invokes the Right of Conscription, Anders knows better than to say no. It’s an escape—it’s the path out that he’s been looking for, and it pulls him right from under the Circle’s _noses_. He would be an idiot not to take it. Anders is a lot of things—reckless, sometimes, headstrong always, and stubborn to a fault, but not an idiot.

It’s a high price to pay for freedom, Anders knows. It’s not as though Grey Wardens have a particularly high life expectancy. If he does it—and he knows he will—he’ll be signing away a great deal of his life, and the life he has remaining will not be easy.

But he thinks about the Circle, and about the year he spent in a small room with a cat for company, and the ice-cold anger he honed to deadly sharpness. He thinks about children like him torn from their families and forced into prison towers, and he thinks about orphan girls who can’t find enough food to last them through the day, but still share their blankets with strange boys—

Anders thinks about all these things, and does it anyway.

Afterwards, the Warden-Commander finds him standing in a hallway, watching people clean away the remains of darkspawn and templars strewn across the floor. (He did this, Anders thinks. _He_ is responsible for this.)

“Are you going to ask me why I did it?” Anders asks quietly, glancing down as a Warden picks up a severed hand. “Why I killed those templars?”

“No,” says the Warden-Commander. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Doesn’t it?”

“We do not choose people because of their histories or motivations.” Down the hall, a Warden puts his sword through the skull of a not-quite-dead darkspawn, and the Warden-Commander sighs and looks away. “You have a fire in you that will not go out. That’s what matters.” He glances sidelong at Anders and smiles, just a little, at the very corner of his mouth. “Do you know how we can tell who will survive the Joining?”

“I don’t know.”

“Some people are offered the choice, and they look at a life of battle and hardship and decide that they would rather go back to whatever life they lived before. And some of them, like you, look at it and think it worthwhile nonetheless.” The Warden-Commander nods slightly and turns away. “That is how we know they will survive.”

—

**v. dedications**

Kirkwall is an accident. Anders leaves the Wardens with the intent to go through the Free Marches and into the Imperium—like he’d planned so many years ago, when he’d been skulking like a feral animal through the Lake Calenhad Docks. But he lands in Kirkwall under the shadow of the Gallows and the spirit of Justice that he carries inside him will not let him leave.

So in Kirkwall he stays.

_You could not bring yourself to leave a place where mages are treated as they are here_ , Justice tells him, one night when Anders has been particularly self-pitying. These are the nights when Anders hates himself, hates the Chantry, hates all of Thedas with a passion that feels like hot coals in the pit of his stomach, smoldering.

“Couldn’t I?” Anders asks. It’s a rhetorical question, but Justice does not yet understand these subtleties.

_You are not the coward you were._

“Excuse me,” Anders says. “I am not a coward.”

_You were. You could think only of yourself and your own pain._

It stings, mostly because Anders knows that what Justice says is true. It’s difficult to hide things like this from a spirit of the Fade, particularly when they inhabit your body, your _mind_ , and Anders had once looked only for his own freedom.

It’s not to say he didn’t care about anyone else. Only that his own hurt was so consuming that it was hard to see anything else.

“Oh, you’re right,” he admits. The legs of his chair creak when he tips back. “Even when I was an apprentice planning to destroy the Chantry, I was doing it for personal vengeance.”

_And now you do it for me._

“For justice,” Anders says. The Circle in Kirkwall is worse than the Ferelden Circle had ever been, and the restless, pressing desire to right so many wrongs is only partly to do with the spirit possessing him. “Exactly.”

—

**vi. lovers**

He didn’t want to fall in love with the Champion (and it would be easier if he hadn’t). There are a hundred thousand very good reasons why it’s a terrible idea—Anders is an apostate mage, and he’s a hunted man. No one who is with him is ever safe, not really, not even in the relative anonymity offered by the Darktown slums and under the protection of neighbors who would not see their healer dead. Anders knows that every day might be the day the Chantry finds him and drags him back to the Circle, and he also knows that he would rather die than see himself there again, tranquil. He lives every day prepared to take his own life, and that burden would be heavy on anyone’s shoulders.

And yet here they are.

Here they are, standing at the foot of Hawke’s bed, and the Champion of Kirkwall is Champion no longer, just Hawke, for now. Anders is still wearing all of his clothing, but he feels more naked than he ever has before.

“You’re thinking,” Hawke says, his accusatory tone belied by the barely-suppressed smirk on his face. “It’s giving me a headache.”

“Terribly sorry,” Anders says, even though he’s not, really. “Though it’s arguably your fault for leaving me with so much time to _be_ thinking.”

Hawke kisses like he does everything—wholeheartedly, holding nothing back—and it’s all Anders can do to let himself be overwhelmed. They’re both wearing far too many layers, and it takes an age before Anders finally works his hands into Hawke’s shirt, presses his fingers against the solid muscle of his back.

“Hmm,” Hawke says, his beard rough against Anders’ skin as he leaves a mark where his throat curves into his shoulder. “Touchy. I like it.”

For someone with so many people and things demanding his attention every day, Hawke’s gaze is surprisingly focused. He presses Anders back into the mattress and holds him there, still for a moment, looking at him like it’s the first time they’ve seen each other—and in some ways it is, perhaps, because Anders has never been this open with anyone, this vulnerable, and he knows the uncertainty reads like ink on his face. (He’s always been a terrible liar.)

“Anders,” Hawke says, his voice nothing more than a deep rumble that Anders feels vibrate through his bones.

“Yes,” Anders says. It’s not an acknowledgement of his name, but rather encouragement, consent, acceptance, the only word he knows to convey everything he wants Hawke to understand in this moment. “ _Yes_ , Hawke.”

The magnitude of it all is too much for Anders to think about, too huge and complicated, so he just digs his fingers into Hawke’s shoulders and lets himself forget what his mind is for. Anders lets Hawke take him apart, kisses him until he can’t remember what his lips felt like without Hawke’s against them, until all he can focus on is this, and them, and everything beyond that is so distant and far away that it doesn’t even bear considering. There is nothing in this world besides them.

He lets Hawke take him apart, and it feels a little like salvation.

Afterwards, he leans on Hawke’s chest and looks down at him, memorizing the lines of his face—the scars, certainly, but also the shape of his mouth, the laugh lines at the corners of his eyes, the split in his lower lip that Anders had caused not an hour before.

Hawke cracks one eye open. “Looking for something?”

“Not at all,” Anders says, and does not say, _I think I’ve already found it._

—

 **vii. escape into silence**

When they leave the smoldering remains of Kirkwall behind them and flee north, Anders can’t feel anything at all. He’s spent so long with anger and hatred and vengeance festering inside him, and he’d thought the destruction of the Chantry would ease that ache—but it hasn’t. It hasn’t at all, and the intersection of hurt and fear and sorrow leaves him numb.

They don’t talk as they travel, at least not beyond instructions—turn left here, watch for Mabari there. It suits Anders fine—he doesn’t think he has the words he’ll need.

Along a tributary of the Minanter River, they stop so Hawke can bathe, rid himself of the blood and soot and filth that’s covered him since their last hurrah of a battle. Anders sits on a rock along the edge of the river and tosses pebbles into the water. He knows he can’t look much better, but his mind isn’t on cleanliness—it’s back in Kirkwall, with the hundreds he’d killed and the fate he’d expected and failed to find.

“Anders.” Hawke’s fingers wrap around his wrist, catching him midway through a pebble toss. “Stop it.”

For an instant Anders wants to pretend innocence, that Hawke is talking about the pebble-throwing and not the words that have been hanging unspoken between them since Anders apologized for breaking Hawke’s heart—but he doesn’t have the energy for disingenuity. “I can’t,” he says, looking down at the remaining stones in his palm. “I have too much blood on my hands to be able to stop.”

For a moment Hawke looks at him like he’s said something terribly foolish, and maybe in some ways he has—Hawke has more blood on his hands than Anders does, likely. But then again, Hawke has never deliberately orchestrated the slaughter of hundreds of people.

“Then what?” Hawke says, loosing his grip on Anders’ wrist. “What answer are you waiting for?”

“I thought I would die in Kirkwall.” Anders drops the pebbles, but doesn’t bring his gaze up from his palms. “I hoped I would. It would be the least—”

“The least you could do.” Hawke sits down on the flat of the rock. From the corner of his eye, Anders can see the way Hawke is looking at him—it’s not anger like he’d expected. Surprising. “Maybe living is the least you could do. Think about that.”

“I killed _hundreds_ of people, Hawke—”

“And now you have to live with that blood on your hands.” Hawke doesn’t say it like he means to be cruel—more like he’s stating a fact, making an observation. It’s not worth it to be offended. Hawke has never been the type to offer comfort that isn’t deserved. “And that guilt’s going to drive you for the rest of your life.”

Anders turns to look at him, and Hawke is smiling, just a little, for the first time since they ran from Kirkwall with the dogs of war on their heels. “If you want to atone for something, living with it is the best way,” Hawke says. “And besides all that, for someone who’s lived such a complicated life you have an incredible talent for oversimplification.”

“What does that mean?” Anders nearly demands, but Hawke just shakes his head a little and stands.

“You’re not getting rid of me that easy,” he says, offering Anders a hand to pull him up. He’s really smiling now, the same mischievous, easy grin that Anders had fallen in love with all those years ago. “I believe I made some kind of grand promise about being in it for the long haul.”

“Have I told you, you’re much more than I’ve ever deserved,” Anders says, looking at Hawke’s outstretched hand. All of this, the love and trust and the way Hawke has always protected him fiercely even when Anders thought he shouldn’t—it’s more than he’d imagined, much less reached out for.

“You’ve told me,” Hawke says. “But you know what I think of that.”

“I know.” Anders reaches out to take Hawke’s hand. “You’re a very strange and confusing man, Garrett Hawke.”

“And you wouldn’t have me any other way.”

It’s the self-assurance that makes Anders smile, but it’s the unspoken words beneath the surface that start something warm just behind his ribcage. He looks up at Hawke, blinking against the brightness of the sun, and knows he wouldn't want any of this—the sun, the wind, the vastness of Thedas opening before them—without Hawke at his side.

“You’re right,” Anders says, feeling the way Hawke’s hand closes around his. “I wouldn’t.”


End file.
